Seed of Doubt

When Maggie Sinclair, a wealthy member of Father Dowling's parish, suddenly dies, Dowling suspects foul play, and the amateur sleuth investigates the secrets surrounding the squabbling Sinclair clan and their valuable art collection.

Although the unflappable Father Dowling plays a fairly slender role in his 16th case, fans of the sleuthing priest will surely welcome the heftier-than-usual read McInerny provides here. Margaret Sinclair, peppery scion of a wealthy small-town Illinois family, dies unexpectedly and surprises most of the Sinclair clan by leaving her fortune to set up a foundation. To her great-granddaughter Peggy, she wills a diary of her short-lived marriage, which ended in tragedy, and a valuable portrait of herself by noted artist Clayton Ford. While Margaret's relatives wrangle over the will, the skittish director of a local museum uses the confusion to steal a lesser known Ford portrait loaned by Margaret, although his plan to flog it to a shady art dealer goes wildly awry. In this intentionally transparent plot--we see the deeds and know the doers--the only question is how long it will take Fr. Dowling and the bumbling police force to figure out where they went wrong. Even the tantalizing promise of the contents of Margaret's diary fizzles in the denouement. Nevertheless, McInerny delivers a comfy unreality in this genteel whodunit, graced with the trappings of a traditional Catholicism.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Aged matriarch Margaret Sinclair, one of Father Dowling's parishioners and head of Fox River's most prominent family, has died, leaving behind a trove of near-priceless Clayton Ford paintings, other holdings in the millions, and a will that sets her heirs at loggerheads. Peggy Sinclair, a great-granddaughter, is happy with her bequest--Margaret's diary, and a Ford portrait of Margaret, done just before the short-lived marriage to Matthew Sinclair, which ended tragically on their honeymoon 75 years ago. Soon after Margaret's funeral, her chef, Regis Factor, apparently commits suicide, in a way that raises doubts in the mind of Medical Examiner Monique Pippen, who'd had questions too about Margaret's death and about her nurse Honora Brady. Meanwhile, the Fox River Museum with its collection of Fords--given or loaned?--is garnering much publicity. Its mendacious director, George Mason, is clumsily attempting to make his own fortune by way of another Ford portrait- -twin to the one of Margaret--of her onetime maid Bridget. Ford scholar Geerhart Glockner flutters on the edges, hoping to discredit Mason, while Peggy falls unhappily in love and seeks out Bridget, feeble but feisty, living in a nursing home. Her grandson Lester heads the Fox River Historical Society and has his own nefarious agenda. There are other puzzles brewing, plus other deaths to come, before it's all over, ending a tumultuous, ambitious, but sometimes tedious story that diffuses its energies in too many directions. McInerny (Desert Sinner, etc. etc.) is best in simpler mode. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.